American Sanctuary, Understanding Sacred Spaces (review)

This fascinating collection of essays seeks bravely to "redefine the study of American sacred space." Its articles consciously foreground the "multifarious," tracking the most varied of sacral allusions in this country's contemporary environment. Collectively they illustrate how sacred space, while perhaps undergoing an atomization due to our nation's increasingly diverse character, has far from lost its relevance to the average citizen. The case studies are broadening and often riveting.

As the volume argues, American sacred practices have expanded well beyond traditional "places of worship" and "institutionally sanctioned ritual." Thus our analytical techniques must cast a "wide net" as well. The editor shapes this volume around the "everyday beliefs and practices of the laity," seeking to expand beyond typical definitions of the sacred such as Eliade's ontological marking of a center or the Platonic Tradition's conflation of beauty with the holy. The volume explores numerous examples that under those definitions might be considered too lightly inscribed, too sociopolitical, too unstable, or too contested to qualify traditionally as sacred space.

Most intriguing about this volume is its focus on sacred space, in contrast to a more typical focus on sacred buildings. Several of the volume's most fascinating essays explore how various religious markers have been used to delimit and identify sacred precincts with little or no dependence upon, or reference to, the design of an all-encompassing, physically built surround. The Hebrew traditions of the eruv (amalgamating many dwellings into a single communal "domain" for ritual purposes) and the mezuzah (an exterior doorpost scroll indicating Jewish observance within the home) show communities or families subtly tracing sacred lines or gateways within otherwise undifferentiated, secular space. Contemporary expressions are contrasted with historical cases, showing how modern life can simultaneously empower and erode such non-brick-and-mortar devices. Other articles explore evocations of the sacred in wide-open spaces such as in New York's Central Park, traditionally African-American yard show displays, and cemeteries. An essay on our National Mall in Washington explores how memorials interweave the sacred with messages of politics and power and thus socially energize vast surrounding spaces in unstable but nonetheless potent ways.

The breadth of faiths studied is another strength. Many traditional religions—Anglican, Catholic, Congregationalist, Jewish, and so forth—are examined anew in the evolving and challenging context of the American melting pot. For Catholic sacred space, the financial realities and awkward fate of disused urban churches in "Rust Belt" locations are trenchantly contrasted with the new trend toward huge downtown showcase cathedrals in rapidly growing Hispanic communities like Los Angeles. Longstanding faiths that are new to America also receive attention: an essay examines, for example, how rapidly growing faiths here like the Hindu tradition conduct their public debut. In addition, altogether new and dynamic American sacred trends, such as the Evangelical mega-church-cum-community-center, are opened for scholarly analysis. The volume balances its contemporary coverage with several essays on very specific and poignant details of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American meetinghouses and parish churches.

One overall concern with the volume is coverage of the period 1865 to 1945, when the vast majority of sacred spaces in America were built. On this period the collection is largely silent—offering just the brief, retrospective "Rust Belt" example. Those years were redolent with formalized liturgical hierarchy, gradual development of architectural form, and the expression of relatively continuous, though evolving, traditions. This is no less American than our contemporary shift toward atomization. One would have wished for more on this absent period to generate an effective contrast with the volume's incisive studies of recent times. By so fervently seeking an alternative methodology for today, a prior century-long trend drops from view. Another concern is whether this volume's everyday-oriented and quite personal approach, invigorating as it is, ultimately has the same potential to help us compare, analyze, and classify varied examples of sacred space as do other definitions such as...